How many indispensable leaders can you have before none of them is really indispensable?

The question goes out to the people who decide how much to pay all of these education executives whose generous pay packets make maddening headlines.

In the latest example, the president of El Camino College in Torrance and the community college district’s trustees are under fire after he talked about retiring and they responded by giving him a $40,000-a-year raise to stay. This raised President Thomas Fallo’s base salary to $312,905, increasing by 5 percent annually. He also gets monthly allowances of $916.66 for a car and $1,000 for expenses.

When El Camino faculty and staff showed up at a trustees meeting Monday to demand a raise of their own, board President William Beverly defended Fallo’s pay by saying — as Daily Breeze Staff Writer Carley Dryden reported — the trustees decided the college could not maintain its stability if Fallo left.

“In essence, if you want to keep him, you pay the going rate,” Beverly said.

That’s always the argument, isn’t it?

The Daily Breeze revealed that Centinela Valley Union High School District Superintendent Jose Fernandez received $663,000 in total compensation in 2013, and the school-board president said Fernandez is worth it because the district wouldn’t be making its “remarkable strides” without him.

(It turned out the strides aren’t so remarkable. Which may be why Centinela officials haven’t — yet — used the argument about having to pay to keep top leaders to explain why its administrative expenditures ran two and a half times the state average per student last year.)

Earlier, California Watch reported on the big raises and salaries being given to superintendents of ostensibly cash-strapped school districts all over Southern California, and defenders said the high pay is needed to hang onto top administrators to see the schools through tough times.

And over the past few years, when University of California and Cal State University students and faculty have protested campus chiefs’ huge salaries and allowances, the paymasters trotted out the same rationale: These are uniquely skilled executives! They could make fortunes in the private sector! The education system can’t afford to let them walk away!

Maybe Californians are supposed to thank our lucky stars that we have so many indispensable education executives.

More likely, we should be asking: If, as it seems, we’re told every education executive is indispensable, could it be that none is indispensable? Or at least that there might be even more qualified candidates in the talent pool who would do these important jobs for less money?

In which case these high-paid presidents, chancellors and superintendents aren’t leaders we can’t afford to lose, but ones we can’t afford to keep.